Ain't Gonna Break Out the Hair Shirt this Holiday Season

Batten down the hatches, mateys. We're most of us in for a pefect storm of foods:
Candies, chips, cookies, cakes, breads, kolač, nuts, crakers...booze, pastries, booze pastries...

It's true. Booze pastries. My wife has a 5 gallon bucket wherin she's steeped, for months now, several loaves of homemade fruit cake in a bottlesworth of high octane brandy.

Am I going to eat/drink that? Yes. Yes I am.

How can I not?

And there's the problem with the holidays. Everything is so good, how can you NOT eat? I admit, I've had terrible luck sticking to my diet these past few days. Most days I've been coming just under the wire of my caloric limit. Yesterday I went way over...but I think I burned most it off by shampooing the carpet and searching around for a gifts for my 789 nephews. Not that it's an excuse.

In a way, I'm trying to keep this in perspective and now allow my failure to stick to a strict diet make me give up the ship once the rough high calorie waves of carbs and sugars have settled down.

After all, Christmas time...the solstice time...it's traditionally been a time of feasting. Perhaps the problem is not the presence of feasts during the Holidays. Perhaps the problem is that we feast all 365 days of the year as well.

Maybe it's okay to have a short time of gluttony to look forward to, and to remember fondly, while we spend the rest of the year adjusting to a healthy, normal eating style.

I remember learning about medival monks. They'd have their strict, regimented lives day in and day out. And then one day out of the year, for the entire day, the youngest monk got to be the head monk and for that whole day hillarity and chaos ensued. A pressure valve. A time of relative abandon.

Food addiction aside, where overeating is a severe, chronicl problem...if releasing the pressure valve once in a while was good enough for Medieval monks, it's good enough for me. I'm going to sample my favorite dishes this time of year. I'll celebrate with friends. I'll try to watch my food intake, but I'm not going to break out the hair shirt if I go over. And then...when the holidays are done, the feast is over, right? Such has been the lot of mankind for centuries.

Venturing into Candies and the Smell of Christmas Things

Today I venture into the high-risk pool of Holiday candy production. Sure, I may be on a diet, but one does not turn ones back on tradition, especially with children in the house. They must know the ways and virtues of the Candied Orange Peel dipped in milk chocolate. And besides, they make fine gifts.

Christmastime is a time of smells and snow. We barely have the snow right now, which is a strange thing in Michigan. So we'll need to go extra-heavy on the smells and create that humid food-preparation environment Grandma used to have going on every time we'd enter her house on any special occasion.

I've got a cabinet full of the spices. I've got the savory spices in one cabinet and the sweet/halloween spices in the other. Strange that synesthasia and spices are so Month-oriented:

In October the smell of cinnamon and clove conjurs memories of Witches brew and pumpkin breads, and watching Young Frankenstein on television.

In December the smell cinnamon and clove awakens memories of raisin breads, raisin sauce, spiced ham and that strange cheese, bread, egg thing at Grandma's house with my family, and those flying-saucer type tree orniments I used to love to pull off the tree and fly around the house.

Anyway, the point is, smell is important. And I want my two little boys to have that smell-memory activated and associated with pleasant home memories when they smell holiday spices.

And so, today, we make candies.